Hi, this is me, Alex Schroeder, trying to explain why wikis are great for role-playing games. If you don’t know what a wiki is, or if all you know is that Wikipedia is a wiki, see What is a wiki? If you’re ready to give it a try, see How to start?

A wiki is great for role-playing games because they are easy to start, easy to join, there is no lock-in, and you’re free to organise it any way you like. And it’s easy to use.

Easy to start. Visit the HomePage, enter the name of your wiki, bookmark the page and you should be ready to go.

Easy to join. Campaign Wiki has no accounts. You don’t have to sign up, you don’t have to provide a name or email address, you don’t need to share your data with Google or Facebook or any other big player. Accounts are not necessary because there are no fees and no ads.

You will have to trust me, though. I can’t help you with that. To learn more about me, see the About page.

No lock-in. Campaign Wiki makes it easy to download your data. Even if you’re not a computer person, you can still ask a friend to do it for you.

As Campaign Wiki uses nothing but Free Software, you could also set up your own site and do the same thing. The setup should be reasonably easy to reproduce. And if not, you can always ask me.

Organise it any way you like. Some people say wiki is short for “I can’t find shit.” If people just keep adding pages and nobody organises the site, then that’s indeed what happens. A forum or a blog has an implied structure – posts come ordered by time, later pages take precedence over earlier pages; comments apply to the post they are attached to. On a wiki, you can have all that, or you can have a totally different organisation: